Baseball is a story we tell ourselves

The Cubs home opener was extra melancholy this year. The weather Friday was about 40 degrees, with a brisk wind blowing in from the north, swirling garbage onto the field. The ivy was brown, the ballpark muted under a gray, lowering sky, something straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel. The team, almost needless to say, was lousy, and lost to the Phillies 7-2. Even Wrigley Field, normally so cheery, so special, almost holy, had a dismal quality, its bright new 100 anniversary logos like scarlet make-up slapped upon the cheeks of a dying relative. I couldn't help but squint and wonder what fresh atrocities the Cubs' owners, the Ricketts family, who are starting to seem ever more soul-deficient, will soon be visiting upon the place. It made me remember this tale—actually an assignment, a dozen years ago, when the Sun-Times editor asked me to write something about the netting the Cubs Tribune owners erected in the outfield in 2002 to block the view of the rooftops across the street: This is what I came up with:

     That vacant lot? That charred corner of land? You mean you don't know? I thought everybody knew. Course, how long have you been in Chicago? Just since 2019? I guess you wouldn't know the story then.

     Scary place, eh? Nothing'll grow. Nobody can build anythin'. People walk faster, or cross the street. I've seen a grown man stop and cry. It's a sad tale, that's for sure. Let me tell you.

     That scorched bit of blasted land used to be famous, used to be a ballfield. Wrigley Field, they called it. Oldest park in baseball. Oh, it was a beautiful place. Bricks. Ivy on the outfield wall. And the team, the Cubs. People loved 'em, loved 'em. Win or lose, didn't matter. Fans would pack the park. Just to enjoy the game. It was a pleasure just to sit in the stands, nice spring day, suck back a beer, watch the outfielders spit and the elevated train rumble by.

     Things changed, sure. Back in '88--that must have been before you were born--they put in lights. Last ballfield to have 'em. Lot of the neighbors complained but, frankly, Wrigley was even more popular after the lights. You should have been here on a warm night in springtime. It was like Mardi Gras. Win or lose. People were happy. The team sometimes did well--well enough to break your heart, anyway. Some years they'd start strong and fold, other years they'd start weak and take off at the end when it was too late. Either way, it was always interesting. Until '02, of course.

     I'm getting there, I'm getting there. See, baseball was never the game of hits and outs that the players thought it was, or the game of dollars and deals the owners thought. There was an otherworldly sweetness to it, a soul, a karma, and woe to anyone who crossed the Great Baseball Spirit. Baseball was the only sport that had the concept of the Goat--a player who did something so bad, so clumsy, it forever cursed him. A bobbled pop fly could haunt a player to his dying day.

     Players got cursed. Teams, too. Did you know that the Murmansk White Sox once played on the South Side? That was before Americans completely lost interest in baseball and the teams were scattered around the world. It's true. Sox fans, what fans there were at the end, attributed it to the team refusing to let veteran Minnie Minoso have an at-bat in the 1990s. He had batted in every decade for half a century--beloved guy, just wanted one swing. And the team--a buncha crybabies if ever there were--was heading for the playoffs, and got puffed up, jealous of the spotlight on good old Minnie, and said no. Lost the playoffs--some people said they lost their souls. Anyway, never were the same, and then, pow, off to the Arctic Circle, to grab at inside-the-park home runs with numb, blue fingers, playing in eternal midnight on the permafrost.

     OK, I'm getting there. Wrigley Field. Lights didn't hurt it. A big coral reef of garish sports bars didn't hurt it--they were all in the proper spirit of the game, the spirit of fun. But in '02, the joyless corporate entity that owned the team strayed over the line. It put up a screen, a scary dark green net, over the chain link fence behind the bleachers over on Waveland and Sheffield--you can still see the faint outlines of the streets over there in the parched earth.

     Why'd they do it? Spite. Meanness. A couple hundred fans liked to gather on the rooftops across the street and enjoy the games. They'd spend a dollar that didn't end up in the Cubs' pockets. T'wasn't anything harmful about it. But it drove the team owners crazy--crazy with greed. They put up the dark screen to block the view. To hurt their fans.

     Things went downhill, fast, after that. Strange injuries to star players. Small things at first. Guys got hurt. A relief pitcher broke his foot during practice for no reason at all. Then players were afflicted by all sorts of odd ailments--boils, huge bleeding warts. One was struck by lightning, and his hair turned completely white. Sammy Sosa tripped over a base and shattered like a glass vase.

     Sure, the Cubs tried to make things right. They brought in exorcists, Native American shamans. They even--people say--sacrificed a goat on a stone altar. They looked at everything but the real problem, which even people at the time saw. I remember a feng shui expert, Patty Par, took one look at the dark screen and said: "Oh my God. It is not good. You are taking out the chi energy. The net is like a trap, trapping in bad feelings. People are trapped."

     Par saw only one solution. "I would suggest take it out."

     Did they listen? No. The people who owned the Cubs, well, if nothing else, they stand by their mistakes. They kept the netting--the trap--while the team went, first 2 and 6, then 2 and 60, and finally finished the season at 2 and 156, with four games unplayed due to the hail of burning frogs that started to fall, just on this corner, at season's end.

     Ah well. That's the story. They never did play baseball here again. The Cubs, what was left of them, moved to Brazzaville, where they are the perpetual cellar-dwellers of the Sub-Saharan League. Wrigley Field stood vacant for a few years, forlorn and sad, but was eventually sucked down into the sulfurous hellmouth that opened up underneath it in '09. The only thing left standing was the left field wall, with that dark green netting flapping in the chain link fence. People couldn't bear to look at it.

     Here, here's a handkerchief. I told you it was a sad tale. People just don't know a good thing until they go and ruin it.


(Oh, and if you're looking for the Saturday contest, I thought I'd take a week off, and try to cook up something a little more challenging).

Amnesty International debates going to bat for pimps

     I hated the movie "Pretty Woman," Julia Roberts' fairy tale about prostitution. Having interviewed actual street prostitutes, and seen how they lived, it seemed such a deformation of reality, beyond the pale. "It's like setting a musical in Auschwitz," I told somebody. What was in my mind, watching it, was going out with Cook County Sheriff's police, busting hookers on Cicero Avenue. I couldn't imagine how men would pick up these particular women and have sex with them —I was uncomfortable standing on the same sidewalk, breathing the same air. Anyway, that was what was in my mind when I was writing this column Thursday: 

    This weekend, Amnesty International USA is holding its annual meeting ­— Human Rights Conference 2014 — in Chicago, just as many organizations do.

     Registration begins Friday morning at the JW Marriott on West Adams. As is common with such events, there will be awards and tributes, speeches and seminars, pizza and programs designed to “develop, sharpen, and practice organizing skills.”

     Standard stuff. Except for one item on the agenda, from 6 to 6:45 p.m. Friday, a discussion on “Human Rights Policy: Consultation on the Decriminalization of Sex Work.”

     In case you are tempted to stop by that conversation, you can’t: closed to the public.

     You may, however, join the protest convening in the street at 5 p.m. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan will be there, along with Cook County Commissioner Bridget Gainer, asking Amnesty International why it is using its good offices, usually found spotlighting torture and political oppression, to go to bat for pimps and johns.

     “To me, as a woman, as the mother of two daughters, as the attorney general, I don’t want to live in a world where we say it’s OK to enslave or exploit women,” said Madigan, whose office works to combat child pornography and sexual trafficking. She said the “unspeakable horrors” her investigators uncover is why she is planning on personally attending the protest. “The reality is, no young girl dreams of growing up to become a prostitute. It’s not a choice.”

     Amnesty says the whole thing is a misunderstanding — that it is firmly opposed to sex trafficking and child sex abuse. But . . .
     "The evidence shows that best way to ensure sex workers' human rights is to decriminalize the buying and selling for sex," said Cristina M. Finch, managing director of Amnesty International USA's Women's Human Rights Program.
     "Our goal is to find the best way to protect the human rights of millions of sex workers around the world," the group's Washington office said, in a statement. "Decriminalization of sex work involving consenting adults may assist in that effort."
     The issue pivots on that notion of consent. Is Madigan right, that prostitution is invariably the result of sex abuse and coercion? Or can it be a choice, a business transaction among consenting adults?
     "We believe all policies regarding prostitution should be based on realities, not theories," said Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, who called the idea of prostitutes choosing that life "a myth."
     "The overwhelming majority were first prostituted before they turned 18," she said, "The research makes it clear: Child sexual abuse is boot camp for prostitution."
     She said that not only do movies put a false, bright spin on prostitution, but often the prostitutes must do so themselves.
     "A lot of girls and women in the sex trade, if you ask them, 'Do you have a pimp?' they'll say no," said Morris Hoffer. "But if you ask, 'Do you have a boyfriend to whom you give all the money you make?' they say yes."
     Amnesty International stumbled into this debate last year when a draft "background document" was posted online, which begins, "Amnesty International is opposed to the criminalization or punishment of activities related to the buying and selling of consensual sex between adults. Amnesty International believes that seeking, buying, selling and soliciting paid sex are acts protected from state interference as long as there is no coercion, threats or violence associated with those acts."
     The group is only discussing this proposal, behind closed doors, on Friday. The actual vote will take place in October.
     Morris Hoffer said in the past Amnesty International has initially blundered when it comes to women's issues, for instance claiming that female genital mutilation "was a cultural practice it shouldn't take a position on." Then the group reversed itself and became active in the fight against the practice. Those protesting hope they reverse on this issue too.
     "Virtually all people who prostitute themselves were first prostituted as children and they see no alternative to survive," Madigan said. "No child, no one's son or daughter should ever have to engage in acts they don't want. . . . There's no dignity at all in being a prostitute."
     Even if some minority of prostitutes engage in the practice willingly, as adults, that isn't an argument for permitting the trade.
     "Prostitution needs to be illegal for the same reason child labor and heroin need to be illegal," Gainer said. "Because they're generally harmful and cause harm through society. All these women are forced, one way or another. This is not 'Pretty Woman.' ''

Westward ho, to ... Pomona!

Pomona College

     "April is the cruelest month," The Waste Land famously begins. Though T.S. Eliot is referring to memory and desire, and not to colleges accepting —or, in most cases, rejecting—prospective students in the days clustered around the 1st. But he might as well have been. Everyone comments on how hard this process is on kids, and it is. A vast game of high stakes musical chairs where colleges entice you to apply, flatter and beseech, so they can spin around and reject you, and then point to their low acceptance rate as proof of their desirability. It's a mean trick. 
     But kids are resilient. Like babies, they bounce. Less spoken about is the effect on parents, who see their dreams not just deferred, but rejected altogether. "Cruel" is apt.
     My high school senior is one of those bright kids who parents don't guide so much as applaud. A dozen years of arriving at parent conferences where we walk in and the teacher looks at us and almost bursts out laughing. What's there to say? He's fantastic. You know. Yes, yes we do. Thank you very much.
     Not that we expected top colleges to echo that. We knew it would be a struggle, a crap shoot, to find one he liked, that would also let him in. The top schools reject 9 out of 10, if not 95 out of 100. A lot of good kids are sent packing. Ours could draw the short end of the stick. I told myself that. But I didn't believe it. Not really.  

Dartmouth

     It is one year and two months since we started the process, flying out to look at Johns Hopkins, Swarthmore and UPenn, the first of 14 schools we would visit. A grueling 14-month trek up Mt. College. "It's all part of the education!" I would quip, putting on a brave face, as we puzzled over maps, tour schedules, admission guidelines. We giddily visited the East Coast: Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst and such. After each school, I'd suggest we race in triumph to the bookstore, buy him a school t-shirt in celebration. This was the one! Wasn't it? No, he'd say. Wait. These were long shots, my boy explained, even for a guy with a 36 on his ACT. At 17 he viewed the situation with more maturity than I did. I almost didn't believe him. What do you mean you won't get in? Have little faith in yourself! But by the time you slice up the various groups — half the class will be women, a third will be minorities, plus athletes, plus legacies, the number of slots going to the army of bright middle class suburban Jewish white kids are few. That's just the way it is. 
     I admired his level-headedness. He examined the numbers — he's so good at that — and decided to go early decision to improves his chances, for the two schools he had the best shot at, Columbia and the University of Chicago. Plus a dozen more for variety and backup. 
     Win-win, I decided.  Either one would be fine. New York is the center of the world. And I work in downtown Chicago, and immediately formed the fantasy. I could see myself taking the Metra electric train—convenient as heck and only $3 — down to Hyde Park, to the University of Chicago campus. Squiring my young genius to lunch, plus a few of his equally quirky U of C friends. Stopping at Powell's Bookstore, then happily back downtown. I could see myself on the train, on the trip back, contentment rolling off me in waves.
     Early decision verdicts came in February. The news was bad. No Columbia. No U of C. To be honest, at first I thought he was teasing us, pulling our legs, gauging our reaction before he sprang the "Just joking!" My faith in him was that high. No, incredibly, it was true. It seem almost unfair. No lunchtime visits to Hyde Park. I felt cheated — how could this be happening to me?—but rallied. Okay, I thought. "That's God's way of saying he's going to Princeton," I told co-workers. They'd look at me strangely, and it dawned on me that they have problems bigger than mine.
     I knew I was approaching this all wrong. It was his life, not mine. I kept trying to remind myself: this isn't about you, it's about him. His school, his life, his future. And to be honest, he never panicked, or at least never showed it. A quiet, studious boy. Our entire conversation when he didn't get into Columbia went like this: Me: "Are you okay?" Him: "Yes." Me: "Promise." Him: "Yes." I worried because he was too calm. That had to be a bad sign.
     I tried to focus on him. But somehow, this kept slipping back into a referendum on me, as a parent, as a person. Other kids were being waved into the top schools. Somehow, the same malign fate that put stumbling blocks in front of me had turned its attention to my son. I had given him this genetic curse: bad luck.  
     Then at the end of March, the whipsaw. Northwestern admitted him — he was relieved, he said, because he had worried there might have been something faulty in his application.  I was relieved too. I had gone to Northwestern, it's half an hour away, in Evanston, he'd be following in my footsteps, which I wasn't crazy about, but okay. It would have to do. A mild cheer. Hail to purple, hail to white. The next day, Middlebury said yes and NU was forgotten. Middlebury is Exeter and Andover gone to college. It has its own ski slope. We would spend four years visiting Vermont. 
     Then Pomona. I barely recognized the name — a college, right? — and kept pronouncing it "Ponoma," then correcting myself. I had never heard of the place before February. He had an airline voucher to use before the end of the month, so visited his uncle in Los Angeles, took a day and grabbed the train to see Pomona. His idea. That's when I first heard the word. It meant nothing to me. He could have said he was going to Tangelo or Emerita. It sounded like a word plucked from a Beach Boys song. "Oh darlin', climb into my Dodge Daytona/ I'll pop the clutch and we'll cruise the beach road/all the way up to Pomona."

Pomona

     No matter. And now he was going to college there. Pomona it is. I fled online. One of the Claremont colleges. Forbes ranks it No. 2, after Stanford. Not just among liberal arts colleges, but among all schools. No. 2. How could that be? They're kidding, right? How could I have missed it? I asked a friend about the school. "Amazing," she said, adding that David Foster Wallace taught creative writing there. It was 20 years ago, and he's gone, but that for some reason helped — this is not a rational process, much of it, but emotional and intuitive. Asking people helped. Everyone seemed to know about Pomona but me. I visited 14 schools, and he picks the one, not only I had never seen, but never heard of. That seemed a kind of justice, payback, retribution for the hubris I brought to the process. "You want to brag, dad? Brag about this...."
     The boy is thrilled. He went online and bought two Pomona t-shirts. He has no doubt — ordered us to send in the deposit now, not to wait. Being subsequently admitted into Vanderbilt and Wake Forest were shrugged off. "Don't you want to even ...?" No. I put in a halfhearted plug for my alma mater. Northwestern has a great reputation, and is so much closer. He killed off that idea in 1o words: "Why would I pay more money for a worse school?" I'm actually the one doing the paying, but saw his point. 
     So now I explain to people what Pomona is: an amazing school, for smart kids who don't need the ivy cache, and their grandiose parents who are being dealt one of those little lessons that fate occasionally serves up to help make a person less grandiose. California is far away, and has earthquakes, but that's where life is taking him. Taking us. I had wanted him to get into a college that I could beat my chest and brag about. A validation. A gold star. But fate would have none of that, and denied me the pleasure, and forced me to think — is that not what college is all about? — to see the ugly solipsism of my ways, and try to do better. I'm still proud — proud that he will be following a trail that he blazed entirely on his own. It's all part of the education. 
      
  
        

So maestro, what's with the stick?

     A good prank needs some kind of expectations of order to push against, and so the general chaos of the web makes a poor environment for April Fool's jokes. Still, I was pleased that a number of readers yesterday truly thought, at least for a moment, that I was changing the name of my blog to "Every gosh darn day," and a few actually complained, which was extra gratifying. 

      Nothing unusual about today's column. I had a chance to talk to a conductor, and leapt at it, asking some questions I, and hopefully others, have wondered about.

Anthony Barrese

     Only one member of the orchestra is mimicked with any regularity. The average guy doesn’t tape empty soda cans together and pretend to play the bassoon, or sit on a chair and saw away at an imaginary cello. Nobody plays the air flute.

     But who has not picked up a pencil and pretended to conduct? You hear some rousing Beethoven symphony, you almost have to. At least I hope you do and it isn’t just me.

     Either way, I’ve always wondered: what, exactly is the conductor doing? I’ve always meant to ask Sir Andrew Davis, conductor of the Lyric, “What are you doing with the stick?” But if divas are stars, conductors are superstars, and the chance to ask him anything has never arisen (well, once, I saw him smoking a cigarette outside the Civic Opera House, but it struck me that a considerate person would leave him be, so I did).

     But when Chicago conductor Anthony Barrese offered to stop by my office and talk about what he does, I jumped at the chance. My first question was: Explain this waving-the-baton business. Musicians seem fairly intent on their music — they aren’t necessarily even watching you. What’s going on?

     “By the time you get to a performance, the great amount of work is done,” he said. “Any conductor who is jumping around, flailing about and wildly gesticulating during a concert, that’s for show. The orchestra is not really paying attention. The real work is done in rehearsal, which you don’t see. By the time you get to a performance, you’re still guiding, you’re still shaping the architecture, musically. But it’s sort of in the hands of God at that point.”

      So why have a conductor at the performance at all? Why not just rehearse, then let them play? Short answer: Stuff happens.
     "The soprano could have an off night," Barrese said. "The trumpet could be nodding off. You're sort of gently keeping it together. You're also trying to inspire."
     Barrese is one of perhaps a dozen full-time conductors who make a living in the Chicago area, including the two stars, Riccardo Muti at the Chicago Symphony and Davis at the Lyric, plus a variety of others who combine university posts and gigs at smaller ensembles. Barrese lives here but conducts for Opera Southwest in Albuquerque and scans the horizon for work, as most do.
     "I do have to cobble together a living," said fellow Chicago conductor Francesco Milioto, who conducts the Skokie Valley Symphony, where he is also musical director, plus is principal conductor of the Highland Park Strings, artistic director at Access Contemporary Music, and fills in as a cover — a replacement conductor — at the Lyric. And he gives vocal lessons.
     "You need a lot of these jobs," Milioto said, but not as a complaint. "I am quite happy. I don't have any other job other than music and am very lucky and very appreciative." (Even stars have multiple gigs: Muti, for instance, conducts here and in Italy while Davis moonlights in Melbourne.)
     Milioto pointed out something I never thought about — that conducting an opera is much harder than conducting a symphony, because not only do you have the orchestra to keep together, but you have to coordinate it with 100 singers and dancers on stage.
     "In opera there is quite a bit of maintaining communication between the pit and the stage," he said. "Half the orchestra is under the pit, so the sense of timing and delay always needs to be dealt with, especially with a chorus on stage. A symphonic performance, it's a little bit easier."
     Barrese started conducting because he needed somebody to conduct his own compositions. While we were on the subject, I had to ask: Classical music of past eras — Mozart, Bach, et al. — is so beautiful; modern music, not so much. What's the matter? Why can't anyone write like Mozart?
     "The more you listen to contemporary music, the less bad it sounds," he replied. "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was seen as crazy in its time, now we think it's gorgeous. 'The Rite of Spring,' there was a riot, people thought it was horrible. Now any decent college orchestra plays it."
     In other words, the culture moves on, and no matter how great something is, if you merely redo it, then you're just aping the past. No matter how exquisite a nude figure you may carve out of marble, Michelangelo has been there, done that, 500 years ago.
     "I had a composition teacher who said that it would be as if rock 'n' roll musicians today were writing in exactly the three-chord style of Elvis Presley," Barrese said. "Things change. You can't go back. You can't write in the style of Wagner anymore."
     That might actually be a good thing. One Wagner is plenty.

Kittens in Yarn Week: Day 2

     My post yesterday on kitties and why they're so cute was really meant to be a one-time deal, sharing the recent Scientific American story on the topology of cuteness. But the reaction from readers was so intense — extraordinary, really — that I decided to continue the theme and make this into Kittens in Yarn Week.
     For those who missed yesterday, not only did I explore the spatial-dimensional qualities of what makes a creature adorable, based on the Golden Section of antiquity, but I further realized that, because the news of late is so grim, and we spend so much time in negativity, bickering over meaningless political differences, some relief is in order. Isn't it nice to just sit back and look at a cute kitty and smile?  In searching for more images of playful puddy-tats with balls of colorful yarn to run for the rest of this week—and there really aren't enough of them, online, so as soon as I can I'm going to hire a photographer, buy some kitties and get busy — I ran into this kitten and yarn joke on cat joke web site.
    Q: Did you hear about the cat that swallowed a ball of yarn?

    A: She had a litter of mittens.     
    Now I suppose that joke itself could be seen as a little mean — it could be very dangerous for a cat to swallow a ball of yarn. She could choke. So while I should point out that the joke is fictional, and thus no actual cat ingested any potentially fatal yarn, I think by passing along that joke, "edgy" though it be, I'm showing that, under this "Kittens in Yarn" business you'll be reading here for the next five days, I'm still the same old Neil Steinberg I've always been, just mellowed and gratified by yesterday's enormous upswell of readership, not to mention commencement of my support of the good folks at Chik-fil-A. (Which is why, as you read here yesterday, that's I've changed the blog's name — "Every g*ddamn day" was so harsh, so negative. Places like WBEZ were reluctant to mention it, and the name scared off potential advertisers. "Every gosh darn day" is just as effective, and has more the spirit of sharp yet forgiving humor I'm now striving for, with none of the off-putting allusions to the deity. Chik-fil-A in no way was responsible for the change; it was just something I happened to do at the same time their ads went up).
      Just so you know the schedule, tomorrow, for Day 3, I'll be serving up three special recipes for cat food, for those of us who just don't trust commercial cat food because of all the waste water created by cat food production. Thursday we'll look at the yarn side of the equation — I've found several veterinary studies that suggest certain colors and types of yarn are preferred by certain varieties of cats. Friday, I will review the top 10 web sites dedicated to showing photos of kittens in yarn. Saturday I look at the hidden history of posters featuring, not only kittens in yarn, but cats with bowls of spaghetti dumped over their heads, or cats hanging by their paws over a cord with inspirational sayings like, "Hang in there!" And Sunday, being the Lord's day, I'll examine whether kittens can be said to have souls — of course they do! — and why we can be certain, based on hard, Biblical evidence, that our cats and kittens will be purring beside the Pearly Gates, waiting for us when we get to heaven. I'll also share some of the outpouring of comments I've received from yesterday's posting.
     Thanks again for all your enthusiasm, welcome to my new readers of "Every gosh darn day," and I hope you enjoy Kittens in Yarn Week, and will stay on for next week, when I focus on UFOs, ESP and Other Amazing Real Phenomena. For next week's full schedule, just click here.

Everygoshdarnday.com welcomes Chik-fil-A.

Why debate details when big issues divide?

     Were I to ask you what color seat you would like on your bus trip to Cleveland, you would probably reply, “But I’m not going to Cleveland.” 

     Were I to insist, fanning a few fabric swatches before you — maroon, a powdery blue, hunter green — you would answer, “It doesn’t MATTER what color, because I don’t want to take a bus to Cleveland!”

     Sadly, this simple logic escapes us when it comes to matters political. We fall to debating specifics — the color of the seat — ignoring a key overarching fact: Some of us want to take the trip; others don’t. 

     The original intention of this column was to look at the state of Illinois with a cool, dispassionate eye and ask: Is Bruce Rauner right? Are we really much worse off under Gov. Pat Quinn? Rauner points to our 8.7 percent unemployment, second highest in the nation. The Quinn people, however, observe that when he took office, it was 11.4 percent. Rauner focuses on the bloat of government, Quinn on how much has been cut.

     Who’s right? The bottom line is, for purposes of conversation, that it doesn’t matter. These stats are specifics: the color of the seat. And no number or group of numbers is going to make Rauner supporters shift to Quinn, or Quinn supporters decide that a rich guy with no experience in government is qualified to run the state. I won’t say which side I’m on, but you can guess. 

     What decides our default, which bin, Republican or Democrat, we live in? I could be a cynic and say it’s your parents’ political party. Most follow the leanings of their parents and never question it.    Having been born blinking into one particular camp, we just shrug and spend our lives there, plucking reasons to justify it as they float by. 

     But pretend, for a moment, that we could actually make the choice. What puts us in one party or another is not pegged to the unemployment levels in Illinois or what the tax rate is, but how you answer the following simple, Cleveland-or-no, five-word question: Is government good or bad?

     Not just Illinois government. All government. If you think government is a good thing, in the main, then you’re a Democrat. You want preschoolers to get that cup of free morning gruel, want rehab clinics for drug addicts. A disaster strikes — and Illinois has been hit with 11 natural disasters since   Quinn took office — and you want the government to show up with backhoes and fresh water. If companies are selling tainted meat, then you want the USDA to be on them like a cloud of hornets.

    If you don’t like government, you’re a Republican. You want to cut taxes and slice deficits until there isn’t any money to fund all those programs that only help people you wish didn’t exist anyway. If companies are selling tainted meat, well, then people should be savvy enough not to buy it. 

     The situation is more complicated. Some government programs bug Democrats: farm subsidies for instance. And Republicans embrace Medicare, out of self-preservation, and blow kisses at the military, as if it weren’t as purely a government function as the National Endowment for the Arts.

     Me, I’m Democratic by breeding — my parents are Democrats; my father, in fact, worked for the government, NASA, for most of his career. And by choice. I make that decision by what I call the Baby Conundrum. If you find a baby on your doorstep, you either a) raise it yourself b) take it to the nearest church or c) call the cops. 

     To me, a) is strange and nobody would do it; b) is theoretical and while Republicans pay lip service, they never call their church to report a fire. The rational person answers is c). You want a government that cares for abandoned babies (fetuses aren’t babies, your Pavlovian bell isn’t ringing) and schools them and treats them when they’re sick. I’ve never heard an argument that explains why that logic falls apart as they get older. To me, the Republican stance against the Affordable Care Act is a shameful nadir of cold-hearted wrongheadedness that someday will be seen as being in keeping with their stance on race and women, and the entire litany of wrongheaded, selfish notions they’ve clung to until the second they’re pried out of their soft little hands. 

     Getting back to Illinois. I would be for Quinn because he fixed the pension mess that grew under his forebears of both parties, and he signed marriage equality into law even though his faith dictated otherwise. That’s another dividing line: Is religion a private matter? Or a whip to make your neighbors/employees do what they don’t want to? Dems to the left, GOP to the right. Oh, and consider a trip to Cleveland. Friendly folk, remodeled art museum. It’s very nice. 

Welcome back to the Steinberg Bakery

     

     Ting-a-ling.

     "Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery. May I help you?"

     "Yes, some rye bread please..."

     "Seeds or no seeds?"

     "Umm..."

     "We use only the finest Hungarian caraway seeds. You can't buy them in this country. A friend's nephew is with the Hungarian consulate. He brings them over in the diplomatic pouch. Rich, pungent, meridan fennel seeds..."

     "Okay, seeds then..."

     "Sliced or unsliced? The unsliced loaf stays fresh longer. But we offer sliced as a convenience for the customer."

     "Sliced please ... "
     "Of course. Always with the easy way. The convenience. Good for sandwiches. Planning a to serve sandwiches at a special gathering, are you?"
     "Isn't Gabby here today? I thought she works on Sundays."

     "Normally yes. But today she has her ... little visitor."

     "Her little visitor?"

     "Yes, you know, her ... ah ... time of the month."

     "Her period?"

     "Shhh, yes. If you insist, but please, I've got angel food cake rising."

     "What does that matter? Does it make her too ill? Tell her Mrs. Mendelssohn was in and asked about her and hopes she feels better."

     "No, not that. Not ill. She feels fine. The intru...visitor. It renders her unclean."

     "Unclean?"

     "Unclean. Leviticus 15, verse 19: 'Whenever a woman has her m-m-menstrual period, she will be ceremonially unclean for seven days.'"

      "I don't see how that..."

     "''If you touch her during that time, you will be defiled until evening. Anything on which she lies or sits during that time will be defiled...'"

     "But isn't that..."

     "Look around you, Mrs. Mendelssohn. Look at the Steinberg Bakery. What do you see? Everything is clean. Everything. Clean. Do you think that is by accident? No. It is not an accident. The floors, swept twice a day. The coolers, the racks, the shelves. We pride ourselves in that."

     "Couldn't she..."

     "Now yes, the actual Biblical passages do not technically forbid a woman who is in that way from working in a bakery...oh, here's your rye bread, with seeds, sliced. Anything else?"

      "Oh thank you. Yes. You have kolatchke?"

      "Raspberry, apricot, strawberry..."

      "Let me have ..."
      "Apple, blueberry, cherry..."
      "A half dozen cherry please."
      "Lemon, cinnamon, cheese..." 

      "Six cherry. Please."
      "... and prune. Six cherry it is. Anyway, it not being specifically forbidden. I tried to be accommodating. But look how narrow it is behind the counter. People bump into each other. One touch and I am defiled, Mrs. Mendelssohn. So many rules, with the women, and it falls to the man to enforce them; hiring them hardly seems worthwhile sometimes. Still, I told Gabby she could work if she didn't sit down.  But it's a long shift, and she kept sneaking rests on the chair."

     "Is that so..."

     "The chair had to be burned, in the Biblical fashion. It got expensive. Have you ever tried to find acacia wood? It isn't easy, and not cheap, I'll tell you that. So now she just doesn't work those days. A week a month I lose her. I keep track on this chart here."

     "That doesn't strike me as fair to her."

     "Not fair? What is not fair to her? She has a job. Nobody put a gun to her head and forced her to work in the Steinberg Bakery. Our reputation is pristine. People line up to work here. Men anyway. Women, not so much. Still, what about fair to me? Why is it the religious for whom fairness is always forgotten? Why do the men always suffer? Should I pay good money, pay a woman good money, so she can pollute and poison the Steinberg Bakery in the eyes of God once a month? Why should I pay for anything that undermines my sincere religious beliefs? The folks at Hobby Lobby certainly don't do that. The Hobby Lobby machers don't feel the need to pay for things that go against their faith. If Hobby Lobby, a store that sells pipe cleaners and glitter and styrofoam balls can withdraw from the government insurance program, can sue the United States of America, the country that we all love, claiming that some crazy contraception device that only a kurveh would use and that doesn't even affect a fertilized egg, not really, if they can decide it is in fact abortion, if they can play around with the health care of thousands of employees based on their own farkochta religious beliefs, why should my sincere and actually-endorsed-by-the-Lord-God-Almighty-instead-of-cooked-up-later-by-frauds beliefs be held in any less regard?"

    "Well, I should be going now..."
     "I mean, God forbid they should pay for anything of which they don't approve. God forbid that one penny of their money earned selling pots of paste should go to anything that doesn't reflect their own whims happily back so they can nod and smile, admiring them. Because they're special, Mrs. Mendelssohn, they're the one true religion that the entire nation was designed to coddle and flatter. They are they stars of the show. The rest of us, we're nobody. We're the scenery. The chorus. Even though the government certainly asks the rest of us to pay for things we don't necessarily like. Oh ho, yes! Churches pay no tax. But the grips and the stage hands and the supernumeraries, we pay the freight. The Steinberg Bakery, we pay tax — plenty of tax. Am I not then, in a very real sense, underwriting those churches? With my cash money? My taxes also pay for the schools, schools which teach kids all sorts of nonsense that I do not subscribe to—schools that serve their kids Chips Ahoy Cookies at lunch time. I have seen it with my own eyes! That serve them white bread puffed full of air. Bread that tastes like nothing. A slander on the word 'bread...'"
     "If I could just..."     
     "Yet I support that. It seems this Lobby Hobby wants it both ways: part of society, when it serves them, when it comes to having their streets plowed so that more big trucks full of stickers and glass beads and woodburning sets can get to their enormous warehouses full of crap. But when government policy strays against their reproductive whims, they sue." 
     "Ah yes, well, I had better be going. That's all today." 

      "Of course, Mrs. Mendelssohn. Right away. The bread, $3.99, the kolatchke, $5 for the half dozen and I put in an extra one.  That's $8.99, plus 80 cents tax to buy public school lunches made of bread I wouldn't use to wipe the counters at the Steinberg Bakery. That'll be nine dollars and seventy-nine cents, please. Out of ten."

     "Well tell Gabby that I said hello."

     "I will, when she returns, five days from now. Twenty-one cents is your change. And believe me, Mrs. Mendelssohn, I'm not happy about this either. I have things to do today. But faith is faith, and either we honor it or we don't. I am the true victim here, being forced to handle both the front of the shop and to mind the ovens in back. Last month, I lost eight pies—blueberry pies, the best, made from the choicest Michigan blueberries, grown especially for the Steinberg Bakery at sun-kissed blueberry patches outside of Ludington. These pies burned to cinders because Mr. Helmholtz came by for his weekly order, and we got into a conversation, a fascinating conversation about Psalm 119 and the need to constantly be mindful of God's law. I will be honest with you: I forgot about the pies. If Gabby had been here, she would have whisked those pies out of the oven at the precise moment of golden crusted perfection. Very good, she is, about timing the pies. But when she is not here, she is not so good. I should have garnished the cost of the lost pies from her wages. But I try to be a considerate boss. Though in matters of faith, there are no considerations to be made. God is very clear about that. I really should not hire a woman at all. You lose one week out of four, at least until they reach a certain age. But I try to run the Steinberg Bakery in the progressive fashion."
     "Umm, yes, right. Well goodbye then."
     "Yes, goodbye. And you'll see what I mean about those caraway seeds. Such seeds you have never seen."

      Ting-a-ling.